Saint Joan

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.

We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. [. . .] We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviours for blasphemers. We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence.

O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

If if's and and's were pots and pans, there'd be no need for tinkers.

I say, if you hate cruelty, remember that nothing is so cruel in its consequences as the toleration of heresy!

Well, what do they all amount to, these kings and captains and bishops and lawyers and such like? They just leave you in the ditch to bleed to death; and the next thing is, you meet them down there, for all the airs they give themselves.

Charles. Oh, your voices, your voices. Why don't the voices come to me? I am king, not you! Joan. They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings, you cross yourself and have done with it. But if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.

A genius is a person who, seeing farther and probing deeper than other people, has a different set of ethical valuations from theirs, and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or her specific talents.

The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart.

I know how many lives any move of mine will cost; and if the move is worth the cost I make it and pay the cost. But Joan never counts the cost at all:

If Joan was mad, all Christendom was mad too; for people who believe devoutly in the existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad as the people who think they see them. Luther, when he threw his inkhorn at the devil, was no more mad than any other Augustinian monk: he had a more vivid imagination, and hd perhaps eaten and slept less: that was all.

I never asked to be a king: it was pushed on me. So if you are going to say 'Son of St Louis: gird on the sword of your ancestors, and lead us to victory' you may spare your breath to cool your porridge; for I cannot do it. I am not built that way; and there is an end of it.

But your lordship knows very well that I am not attached to the soil in a vulgar manner, like a serf. Still, I have a feeling about it; [with growing agitation] and I am not ashamed of it; and [rising wildly] by God, if this goes on any longer I will fling my cassock to the devil, and take arms myself, and strangle the accursed witch with my own hands.

You came clothed with the virtue of humility; and because God blessed your enterprises accordingly, you have stained yourself with the sin of pride.

For now you have only Mahomet and his dupes, and the Maid and her dupes; but what will it be when every girl thinks herself a Joan and every man a Mahomet?

A Frenchman! Where did you pick up that expression? Are these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their countries. Theirs, if you please! What is to become of me and you if that way of thinking comes into fashion?

Not content with being Pope Joan, you must be Caesar and Alexander as well.

Do not think you can frighten me by telling me I am alone. France is alone, and God is alone; and what is my loneliness before the loneliness of my country and my God? -Joan